Smoke billows from a factory on the outskirts of Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning province, May 4, 2007. Climate experts agreed on a U.N. report on Friday that said fighting global warming is affordable and the technology available to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and stave off climate chaos, a senior delegate said. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA) 0

Another international conference on global warming came and went last week, with leading nations agreeing that urgent steps must be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But those countries did not reach agreement on what is arguably their toughest challenge -- coaxing China to take more effective action to limit its surging emissions.

In recent months, new data has revealed that China's greenhouse gas emissions are growing at a much faster rate than previously believed, increasing the danger that any future reductions in rich nations' emissions will be more than offset by China's increases.

At the week-long meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Bangkok, Chinese diplomats teamed with their counterparts from India and the United States to oppose what they said were excessively strict emissions-reduction goals that could restrict economic development.

Chinese officials also complained that their requests for assistance with energy-saving technology -- especially with coal, which is fueling China's red-hot economic growth -- have been ignored.

"There are a lot of barriers to technology transfer," Zhou Dadi, director of the Chinese government's Energy Research Institute and a leader of the Chinese delegation, told reporters in Bangkok. "It is something the developing countries have been asking for many years, but up until now it has not happened."

The International Energy Agency said last month that China - which as recently as 2001 emitted only 42 percent as much greenhouse gases as the United States - is likely to become the world's largest emitter this year. More ominously, China's annual net growth in greenhouse gas emissions, more than 500 million tons, is more than three times the annual increase of all industrialized nations combined, according to data from the Energy Agency and the Chinese government.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, says the United States should not sign any international treaty on global warming unless China also agrees to binding limits on its emissions.

Energy policy experts say the U.S.-China confrontation gives both countries an excuse to do nothing.

"It's a chicken or the egg issue -- who caused the problem, and who should act first," said ZhongXiang Zhang, a senior fellow at the East-West Center, a think tank in Honolulu that is funded primarily by the U.S. government. "But if China becomes the No. 1 emitter this year, it certainly will put pressure on China to take actions and make commitments."

Chinese officials recently have stated that China will not accept any binding limits on its emissions until at least 2050. Instead, they have cited the government's plan to achieve relative improvements by reducing the amount of energy expended per unit of economic output by 20 percent by 2010. But China has made little progress toward that goal since it was adopted two years ago. Last week, the Chinese government released data showing that electricity consumption by residential, commercial and industrial sectors -- a key barometer of emissions -- rose by 15 percent in the first three months of this year on a year-to-year basis.

"This is very frustrating," said Yang Fuqiang, director of the Beijing office of the Energy Foundation of San Francisco, which provides about $10 million annually for energy-efficiency cooperation programs with China.

"The GDP growth rate is now 11.1 percent. Energy-intensive industries such as iron, steel, cement and petrochemicals are growing at 20 percent a year. You can imagine -- at this rate, there's no way we can cut emissions."

Most environmental groups say the United States needs to use carrots, not sticks, with China.

"I accept as a matter of political reality that China, India and the other developing nations are not going to accept binding limitations any time in the future," said Elliot Diringer, director of international programs at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Va.

"We need serious action, but there won't be binding emissions targets. ... That's out of the question in the next round" of climate change negotiations, Diringer said.

Zhou, the Chinese government official, said rich countries must develop and share their advances in clean-coal technology, such as carbon capture and storage, in which greenhouse gas emissions are siphoned off and injected into underground formations like depleted oil wells.

"If advances in technology can be deployed more widely, then it will really help all the world," Zhou said.

Many U.S. experts agree. "We have to engage China directly on clean coal and on industrial energy efficiency," said David Fridley, a China expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He said that while China has well-developed programs on residential and commercial energy efficiency, it desperately needs help to improve the efficiency of coal-fired generators in heavy industry, which consumes 60 percent of China's energy.

The Bush administration's signature effort on coal is the Energy Department's FutureGen, a 10-year, $500 million program to develop carbon capture and storage technology for domestic and international use.

But some experts say the administration has held back FutureGen because of conservatives' fear that it could morph into an interventionist, European-style industrial policy.

A report on U.S. coal policy by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released in March, criticized the Energy Department for limiting FutureGen's activity to mere research.

The report, which was chaired by MIT chemistry professor John Deutch, director of the CIA during the Clinton administration, said FutureGen is plagued by "ambiguity about objectives" and has failed to push for the widespread adoption of clean coal technology by the power industry.

In Congress, many lawmakers favor the creation of bilateral assistance programs to help China adopt energy-saving technology. Some, however, say China is unlikely to accept U.S. advice while the Bush administration is opposing Congressional action to reduce U.S. emissions.

"We can't preach temperance from a barstool," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which was created earlier this year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"In order to re-engage with China and the rest of the international community on global warming from a position of leadership, we must first set mandatory limits on heat-trapping pollution here at home."

In negotiations toward a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, developing nations are looking to Washington, said Jayant Sathaye, a Lawrence Berkeley scientist who was one of the lead authors of the Bangkok meeting's final report.

"I would be hard pressed to see China, India, Brazil or any other developing nations adopt limits if the United States is not willing to take on any commitment or take action domestically," he said.